Since the moon has no atmosphere to slow the projectiles, each one, no matter how tiny, "wreaks havoc," said Paul Warren, a research geochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn't involved in the new study.

In a new study, Marek Zbik of the Queensland University of Technology analyzed glass bubbles collected by Luna 16, the first Soviet probe to return a sample from the moon.

Using a special type of x-ray microscope, Zbik constructed 3-D images of the bubbles' insides.

Instead of containing gas, as bubbles usually do on Earth, the moon bubbles are "filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles' interior," Zbik said in a press statement.

The researcher speculates that ongoing micrometeorite impacts release these nanoparticles, which then mix with the rest of the soil. Because of their size, the particles likely behave according to laws of quantum mechanics, which are very different from the standard rules of physics.

"Nanoparticles are so tiny, it is their size and not what they are made of that accounts for their exceptional properties," Zbik said.

But considering that nanoparticles in general have been known to affect a substance's electric and conductive properties, it's possible the moon particles can explain how lunar soil develops the electrostatic charge that allows it to hover, or why the soil appears to be an unusually good insulator, Zbik proposes.

But lunar scientists aren't sure whether glass nanoparticles are the sole sources of this quantum strangeness.

"We have extensive characterization of the lunar soil with every conceivable technique," said Roy Christoffersen, a researcher in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Sciences directorate at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

For instance, he said, scientists know the average amount of vesicles, or glass bubbles, found in lunar soil. And according to Christoffersen, based on those amounts, there must be plenty of other types of nanoparticles in the lunar soil.

"If you do the math, add up all the constituents of the lunar soil that have vesicles, even if you filled them all with tiny particles and broke them all open, you wouldn't be able to add them up to account for all the [nanoparticles known to be] on the moon," he said.

Also, with only one sample from one place on the moon, it's not clear whether particle-filled glass bubbles are widespread across the lunar surface, Christoffersen said.

UCLA's Warren agrees. While Zbik's images are of "unprecedented high magnification of the interiors of these voids and the delicate structures that form ... I don't know that it's going to change our way of thinking" about the contents of lunar soil.

Fluffy Contaminants?

What's more, Warren cautions, the samples brought back by Soviet missions might not have been stored as cleanly as other moon samples.